Our loss is Seoul’s gain and China’s challenge

The reassignment of Admiral Harry Harris from Canberra to Seoul is palpably a blow to Canberra. But clearly, in today’s circumstances, South Korea takes precedence.

Washington has also been without an ambassador in Seoul since Donald Trump became President. And the peninsula has become a core focus for US foreign policy, with the summit between Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un next month set to rivet the world’s attention.

Harris is an outstanding officer who knows our region as well as anyone. But his shift to South Korea appears to indicate that the US either lacks sufficient talent to fill two important ambassadorial posts, or that the ­appropriate talent is not making itself available to this White House.

Trump seems to have turned against a highly plausible candidate for Seoul in the academic and former George W. Bush ­administration official Victor Cha, after Cha wrote a commentary in January saying the answer to North Korea’s “real and unprecedented threats” was not “a preventive military strike”.

Harris, as a professional military man, well understands discipline and the role of the president as commander in chief. But he too has his own mind, which may over time prove no less questioning than Cha’s as to the valid range of options open to Washington on the peninsula.

As chief of Pacific Command for the past three years, he has become extremely well known in East Asia, and for the most part widely respected.

His recent remarks to the US Senate armed services committee were realistic: that the prospect of the Trump-Kim summit was encouraging; that America could not be overly optimistic about its outcome; that it must approach the meeting with “eyes wide open”; and that North Korea remained the biggest security threat in the region.

Harris’s father was a US Navy chief petty officer stationed in Yokosuka, Japan, where he met his mother, who was Japanese.

When he described Beijing’s constructions of military islands in the South China Sea as “a Great Wall of sand”, China’s news agency Xinhua responded that “it is simply impossible to ignore Admiral Harris’s blood, background, political inclination and values”.

Beijing may worry that Harris’s appointment will make it less likely that Washington will be prepared to concede a withdrawal from its military commitment to South Korea in return for a Kim pledge to denuclearise.

Meanwhile, for Australia it’s back to scratch.